One of our developers is going to be a dad real soon. His waiting stirred the creative juices among the other developers. Brett came up with the following “from conception to birth” scenario à la version control system (used with permission):

mkdir baby
cd baby
git init .
awk 'BEGIN { s="ACGT"; genes=""; srand(); for (i=1;i<=1024;i++) {genes
= genes""substr(s,int(rand()*4)+1,1)} print genes}' > seed
git add seed
git commit -m 'conception'
git remote add mother mother
git push -u mother baby
sleep 23667694.5
git pull mother baby

git is a very popular open source version control system that we use for I guess all our proejcts. I also started using it for reviewing Mahara code and for writing the Mahara user manual.

Blackhat, whitehat, rootkit, cyber security, and bugs are just some of the terms that flew around my head the past weekend because I went to Kiwicon V. Having gone already last year, I kind of knew what to expect and was very much looking forward to 2 days of technical bombardment interspersed with demos of how the talented hack into the system of their choice.

Mind you: hacking is not just the bad, bad guys. There is also a lot of good coming out of hacking: software / web site producers are made aware of security holes in their systems that could be exploited by not so kind people.

It was amazing that some companies don’t care at all: vt for example took down 5 software packages frequently used in Hollywood and only 1 company really talked to him. Others were not as willing and still haven’t fixed their bugs.

I learned:

• how insecure the iPhone is and how easily you could read the RFID information stored on an EFPOS card by using a mobile device.
• that poop has an ASCII sign UTF8 character Unicode code point but in contrast to the snowman sign, it cannot be used in a URL. Go figure.

Poop can't be used as URL

• not to say CyberWar if I didn’t want to start on a drinking binge.
• that I didn’t understand Erlang and couldn’t defile MacOSX on my own.
• how to go rogue.
• how to hide images in images.
• about the National Cyber Security Center.
• how not to go about your first hacking job and that if you do you better know some people in high hacker circles.
• and was reminded of the security fails of the last year.
• and much more

This year’s Kiwicon was the largest so far. There were over 600 participants, and we were in Wellington’s Opera House as the previous venue would not hold as many people. Just imagine 600 people mostly clad in black in the middle of Wellington on a sunny weekend.

Kiwicon is not just a conference, but it is an experience. The pre-conference emails are the funniest ever, the registration process produced random quotes as comments that made you laugh, name tags were not your typical plastic around paper, but laser engraved leather and VIP had hand-made ones. Participants can also learn how to pick locks and handcuffs, and how to work in a team to hack a big organization who does evil.

I am already looking forward to Kiwicon VI to learn even more and be awed by the things that some people find when they look more closely.

While listening to talks on exploiting RFID technology and hiding information in pictures via steganography, I was wondering how secure EyeFi cards were. Could somebody put malicious code on them which would alter images put on the card so that when they are transferred they would not just include the image taken by the photographer but also some hidden information, possibly code that could endanger the computer / server where these images can be uploaded immediately wirelessly?

Today, the cre?me de la cre?me of (New Zealand) cricket, other sports and actors played the charity Twenty20 match “Fill the Basin for Christchurch” in beautiful Wellington summer weather. New Zealand’s premier and traditional cricket ground The Basin Reserve in the city was an ideal place to hold this match.

12,000 tickets were sold (2,000 more than initially planned), but I was fortunate to get one as a few were still available at the gates right after the game had started. YEAH! This was also finally the time that I sat through an entire game – albeit a Twenty20 one

The game participants were high-powered and they had fun playing themselves entertaining the crowd.

The teams are:

Wellington Legends XI (team black)
Coach: James Nesbitt

Martin Crowe (captain; cousin of Russell Crowe), Andrew Jones, Bruce Edgar, Chris Nevin, Ewen Chatfield, Gavin Larsen, Jason Wells, Jonathan Millmow, Matthew Bell, Richard Petrie, Roger Twose, Tana Umaga

Canterbury Invitation XI (team red)
Coach: Russell Crowe (yes, the actor)

Stephen Fleming (captain), Nathan Astle, Geoff Allott, Marc Ellis, Mark Greatbatch, Sir Richard Hadlee, Rod Latham, Craig McMillan, Dion Nash, Adam Parore, Justin Vaughan, Shane Warne

Match Referee: Sir Ian McKellan

Umpires: Richie McCaw, Conrad Smith, Martin Freeman, Mark Hadlow (who also bowled one ball)

Wellingtonians have ingenious ideas when it comes to coffee, serving it, and finding cool locations for a cafe. This coffee shop “Flight Coffee” in an old fire truck is the latest addition to the coffee shop scene in New Zealand’s capital.

Coffee from a fire truck

Alec Couros, one fantastic educational technologist, who recently also got his tenure at University of Regina, finally went viral officially on YouTube with his medley “Alec Goes Viral“.

Curious as I am, I watched it, but could only decipher two of the videos / songs that he imitated.

The first one was really easy as it was “Numa Numa“, a YouTube classic.

The second segment in his short video is a musical drive-thru order. The one original that I know best is RhettandLink‘s “Fast Food Folk Song“. They have been doing some pretty funny songs including commercials for local businesses.

The third video in Alec’s medley is still a mystery to me. Any hints?

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a true curiosity which caused some good laughter today. A colleague showed me his check marks in Firefox today. They were upside down and have been so for a long time. He does not have a clue why they are not the usual way. It does not matter on which web site he wants to place check marks. Be it Moodle, be it Doodle (as in the screenshot), they are always upside down. Should we now call them “hut marks”?

Check marks from down under in Firefox?

Konami code in action on Facebook

The instructions are: “THE FACEBOOK TRICK: press up,up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Enter key, then right click then press up and down and magic circles will appear when you make a mouse click. the only way to get rid of them are to log off or refresh the page…IT WILL WORK! put this as your status if it works.”

It does work. I didn’t get it to work immediately because it gets a bit blurry after the right mouse click, but it works. I tried it in Firefox on a MBP.

One of my Facebook friends found the explanation in the Konami Code.

Now I know for sure that the apps that are suggested in the iTunes app store are country-specific or how else could I explain the #1 app being www.wort.lu? Too bad that I don’t see a general Top Ten list.

Country-specific recommendations for June 14, 2009

In late March / early April (is it really already so long ago?) a video started circulating that was filmed at the Antwerp Central Train Station. Unsuspecting travelers suddenly heard a song from the movie “The Sound of Music” coming from the loudspeakers. Not long after the first notes were heard, people started to dance. It first looked very random, but by and by, more dancers joined in and it became clear that a performance was under way.

It was a very creative performance with a modernized version of “Do-Re-Mi”. It could be called dance mob in reference to flash mobs for which a large number of people suddenly congregate in a public space, perform a pre-arranged action and disperse afterward very quickly. In Antwerp, 200 dancers came together to perform the song and went away. This dance mob was organized by vtm, a Belgian TV station and they filmed the preparations to the event as well in a Making of.

The video has been making the rounds on Twitter for the last month. A similar ad by T-Mobile, “The T-Mobile Dance”, has not been so successful. The people in Antwerp seemed to have been better prepared and documented their efforts as well as the action in itself very well.

The dance was filmed from several cameras that were placed in the grand train station that was very well suited for the performance. It is great to watch the video even after the 5th time and look at the surprised faces of the passers-by. I wish I had been there for the performance, but incidentally, I was in Antwerp almost 2 months prior to the event.

Alec Couros presented “Knock Down the Walls: Toward a Model of Open Teaching” at the MoodleMoot Canada 2009 today. Thanks to the organizers, his presentation was streamed live via Elluminate so that we, unfortunate to not have found our way to Edmonton, were still able to participate and see Alec in action.

As usual, his presentation was inspiring and filled with great examples of open education. However, Elluminate also provided a good deal of discussion in the backchannel for us who participated via it because it seemed that all of us had some issues with the application sharing. It slowed down Alec’s visuals considerably. On the upside, it thus provided for interesting effects:

Slow application sharing

Alec could not leave out Omegle, the “chat with a stranger” service that had made the news recently as I remarked a couple of days ago. He was brave to start a chat session at the conference live! And was lucky to have a good sport in his chat room. We will never know who that person was whose chat had been broadcast to all the presentation attendees in Edmonton and around the world.

Live chat in Omegle with 300 people watching

You: how are you?
Stranger: fine
Stranger: how are you
You: where are you?
Stranger: belgium
You: how are things in belgium?
Stranger: As boring as usual
Stranger: where do you live
You: we are in edmonton, there are about 300 of us watching this… is that ok?
Stranger: sure
You: sorry, we better go.
You: thanks for the discussion
You: bye for now, take care.

But it did not stop there. Alec took brief glimpses at the change of mindset of teachers and students who participate in open teaching and learning scenarios as well as presented their advantages. When the discussion started and no presentation was needed anymore, all who were in Elluminate experienced a strange moment when we saw our Elluminate environment reflected back to us in Alec’s application sharing window.

Elluminated

It was a great way to ease out late Friday afternoon. Thanks again to everybody involved in making this stream possible.

Update: Alec shares relevant links in connection to his keynote in his blog post “Open/Networked Teaching Keynote at MoodleMoot”.